The Sci-Files on Impact 89FM

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Stavros Vakalis. Stavros' research is about advancing millimeter-wave imaging. Millimeter-wave imaging is used in many applications that require "see-through" capabilities. The most famous example is the airport security screening, which cannot take place using a traditional camera. Millimeter-waves can easily pass through clothi...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Thilani Jayakody and Jacob Jensen. Thilani is a third-year Ph. D. student in the Plant Breeding, Genetics and Biotechnology program working on applications of genome editing for crop improvement in cultivated potato in Dr. Dave Douches’ Potato Breeding and Genetics Program. Jacob is a recent graduate of the Genomics and Molecular...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Erika Buhk. Due to the current COVID-19 Pandemic, many Americans are wearing masks in public to slow the spread. Many people question whether the masks actually do anything. Erika researched how the fabric of disposable masks breaks down with use by placing them under a high-level microscope (scanning electron microscope). She us...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Geeta Kumari. Geeta is a joint doctoral program student in the department of chemical engineering and materials science. Her research focuses on metals and a mixture of metals (alloy). She is working on a particular type of alloy called superalloy, which comprises eighteen different elements together. “Superman is fiction, but su...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Varshini Perumal. Varshini is a 2nd-year undergraduate student studying neuroscience at the College of Natural Science . She has been doing Alzheimer's research at the Department of Translational Neuroscience in the MSU College of Human Medicine for around 1.5 years, assisting Dr. Gordon's research. For the past year, Varshini Pe...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Qian Bates. Qian is a first-year student at MSU studying mechanical engineering. She recently did a project that analyzed the reasons behind the materials used to make paintbrushes. Oil brushes are made of natural fibers like hog or sable hair while acrylic brushes are all synthetically made from nylon or polyester and watercolor...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Sukhwindar Ajimal. Heart disease accounts for one of every four deaths in America and heart attacks are a major contributor to this. A heart attack or acute myocardial infarction (AMI) occurs when the blood supply to the heart is cut off. Survivors of a heart attack are usually put on several medications to help improve their hea...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Jasmine Jordan. One of the projects that Jasmine has worked on was about housing segregation in the dorms at MSU. Basically, Black and Latinx students are hyper concentrated in dorms on the edge of campus. This may contribute to feelings of isolation and alienation among them. While other universities have gone above and beyond t...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Megan Carrillo. Megan is a 4th-year medical student at Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine with the goal of pursuing a career in radiology. As someone interested in imaging modalities, she has authored several case reports concerning unique disease states and processes discovered through different imaging st...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Emma Dester and Saad Sharief. Emma is a dual-enrolled BS/MD student in the MSU Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering Department (BAE). She has been doing research in the Nano-Biosensors Laboratory for almost four years. Saad is a Ph. D. student, also in BAE, and is currently in his 4th year of the graduate program. His research...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Hayden Stoub. Hayden is a graduate student in Kathleen Gallo's lab in the Department of Physiology . He studies lung cancer physiology and potential therapies targeted at both tumor and immune cells. Over the years, many advances have been made in how lung cancer is treated, improving both the effectiveness of the treatments, as...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Sarah Jacobson. Sarah examines housing occupations in Italy and West Germany in the 1970s. Although most researchers look at political activists who squatted, she instead looks at southern Italian migrants who occupied out of social need. She views migrants' involvement in occupations as an embodied form of collective action, or...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Dr. Raisa Glabman.  Dr. Glabman is a veterinarian and fellow in the NIH Comparative Biomedical Research Program (CBSTP) in partnership with MSU. As a veterinary pathology resident and Ph. D. student, she is interested in how disease pathogenesis translates across species, and in assessing the validity of specific animal models of...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Jen Zavalnitskaya. Jen is a second-year master's student in the Department of Entomology in the Vegetable Entomology lab . She studies insect ecology throughout agricultural landscapes and how more sustainable pest management strategies can be created in commercial agriculture. Most commercial vegetable cropping systems rely on c...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Hannah Jeffery. The focus of her project is dry beans, the kind used to make refried beans or Bush's baked beans. When prepared fresh, beans are a very nutritious food (high protein, iron, zinc, and fiber), and consuming beans is linked to a lower risk of malnutrition and diseases like type II diabetes and cancer. However, they h...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Chad Hall, a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics . Chad is investigating the speech of Lebanese Americans in Dearborn, Michigan. There is reason to believe that in Dearborn which is unique in the strength of its Arabic community, that an Arabic American English dialect has developed. Typically immigrants to a new co...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Alec Bailey, Anna Graffeo, Robert Gustke, Nic Weller from the Department of Mechanical Engineering .  McLaren Greater Lansing , an acute care hospital split between two campuses in Lansing, is in the process of building a new hospital facility adjacent to Michigan State University. This new facility will feature a rehabilitation...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Selin Akgun. Selin is working as a research assistant in the Multiple Literacies in Project-Based Learning (ML-PBL) project at CREATE for STEM Institute. As a part of the ML-PBL team, she works with 3rd-grade elementary school teachers. She supports their teaching practices through professional learning sessions and virtual curri...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Maria Berry. In her undergraduate research, Maria studies the effectiveness of a high school biology curriculum in fostering students' ability to understand complex biological processes. The ConnectedBiology curriculum uses a multi-level simulation of deer mice to study the process of evolution. It's divided into five units, each...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Jake Sawecki. Jake is a second-year Ph. D. student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and is a member of the Predator Ecology and Astacology lab. Jake joined the lab last year and has adopted the primary research role on the Huron-Michigan Predator Diet Study that began in 2017. His research focuses on the dietary behavi...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Shelby Dechow. Shelby is a 5th year Ph. D. student in Dr. Robert Abramovitch's lab. Her research focuses on how Mycobacterium tuberculosis senses and adapts to its host environment. M. tuberculosis (Mtb) is responsible for around 10 million new tuberculosis (TB) infections annually and causes respiratory disease in humans. Shelby...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Brijen Miyani, Liang Zhao, and Maddie Spooner. Wastewater-based Epidemiology used to predict waves of SARS-CoV-2 in the Detroit region (Macomb, Wayne, and Oakland county). The increment/decrement in the number of SARS-CoV-2 cases could be predicted at least 14 days in advance by monitoring wastewater. This could help the public h...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kelsey Merreck Wagner. Wagner is a printmaker/painter/textile artist, environmental activist, and second-year Ph. D. Anthropology student with certifications/specializations in Gender, Justice and Environmental Change, Human-Animal Studies, and Community Engagement. Wagner has her B.A. in Studio Arts from Western Michigan Univers...

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Sam Evalt. What does creativity look like in practice? Sam's dissertation study focused on creativity in practice through the use of resources. He conducted a comparative study between the education and culinary fields. Resources across the fields mean people such as mentors or colleagues, books, the internet, etc. Sam views the...

“We are all made of star-stuff”, is aptly quoted by Carl Sagan, a famous astronomer. Everything including the oxygen that we breathe, the carbon in our body, iron in our blood, etc. were cooked in the stars by fusing lighter elements into heavier ones, starting with basic hydrogen. Even heavier elements like gold and uranium are formed in more explosive events like supernovae and neutron star merg...